The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) are the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell's dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
It is the job of the Thought Police to uncover and punish thoughtcrime and thought-criminals. They use psychology and omnipresent surveillance (such as telescreens) to monitor, search, find and arrest members of society who could potentially challenge authority and status quo, even only by thought, hence the name Thought Police. They use terror and torture to achieve their ends.
It also had much to do with Orwell's own "power of facing unpleasant facts," as he called it, and his willingness to criticize prevailing ideas which brought him into conflict with others and their "smelly little orthodoxies."
Read more about Thought Police: Operations, Other Uses
Famous quotes containing the words thought and/or police:
“The Virgin filled so enormous a space in the life and thought of the time that one stands now helpless before the mass of testimony to her direct action and constant presence in every moment and form of the illusion which men thought they thought their existence.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Despite your best efforts, you could not invent a better police force for literature than criticism and the author’s own conscience.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)